The social media network recently announced that 25 million merchants have changed their personal Instagram accounts into business profiles. That’s a huge leap from the 15 million business accounts that were active on the app as of July of this year. What’s more, most of these accounts are from small businesses.

The Facebook-owned app introduced business profiles in May 2016 in order to give businesses better commercial representation on its video and photo network. By changing one’s account to a business profile – which is similar to a Facebook page – companies can add a “contact us” button and examine detailed analytics about Stories and organic posts that they have published, like the number of impressions and the reach the posts accumulated.

Graphic via modernsoapmaking.com

Instagram is hoping that the more tools they provide merchants, the more they’ll use the app to expand their business, first organically and then through ads. And it seems Instagram’s strategy is working. Since business profiles were introduced, Instagram’s advertiser base has grown from 200,000 in February 2016 to 2 million by September 2017.

Those numbers clearly show that Instagram’s ratio of business accounts to advertisers is almost the same as its parent company. Facebook boasts of more than 6 million advertisers and 70 million companies using Pages.

About 80% of Instagram’s roughly 800 million users per month follow a business, and about 40% of 500 million daily users check out at least one business profile. Interestingly, two-thirds of the 200 million people who check out a company’s business profile on any day do not follow the brand or company. That is something businesses should consider closely.

Merchants might want Instagram users to tap on the follow button, but they would probably be just as happy if people tap the button to contact the company. After all, this would allow them to develop a customer base that goes beyond Instagram.

Shopify has already established integration tools with Buzzfeed, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and other sites. With this new tool, vendors on Instagram can now tag photos of their products. This will include links to a page that includes more information about the product and its price. Users can buy the product straight from the mobile app using a “Shop Now” button that takes the buyer to the merchant’s page. And this feature is easier to set up with the Shopify integration, especially for users that already sell products on the site.

The company has admitted that Instagram is one of the major drivers of traffic to merchant stores and this collaboration can boost eCommerce sales. In fact, 72% of Instagram users revealed that they bought products they saw on the site. And last July, Shopify closed a deal with eBay that allowed vendors to sell their goods directly through the website, opening it to around 400,000 users. The company also made a similar deal with Amazon in 2015.

It has been Shopify’s game plan to integrate with various eCommerce channels to make it possible for its clients to branch out from their own sites. It also provides its sellers with small loans, shipping services, and payment tools. Shopify even offers tools for vendors to sell their products offline and provides point-of-sale hardware and software for those with physical shops.

The Instagram integration is currently being offered to select vendors but will ultimately be made available to all the stores and vendors that have accounts on Shopify.

Instagram announced today the ability to add stickers to your posts, just like Snapchat. The stickers will be both for the consumer like Snapchat, but more importantly will also be targeted at businesses which are looking for creative ways to promote their products and services.

“Now you have new ways to turn any business moment into something you want to share with your followers,” posted the Instagram blog team. “No matter where your business is or what you’re up to, you can add context to your story with stickers.”

Instagram also announced that on iOS you can now save your entire business story from the past 24 hours to your camera roll as a single video.

How to Use Stickers on Instagram

Simply take a photo and video and then click the new stickers button which is right next to the text and drawing buttons. They say you can “tap the smiley face to find customizable stickers for weather, the current time and even your location.”

According to a post on the Instagram Business blog the number one driver of visits to restaurants is the act of craving. In advertising this simply means making people hungry for what your are selling. Restaurants love Instagram because of its visualness, its frequent use of video in posts and probably most importantly, its primarily consumed on a mobile device.

A 2015 study showed that 53% of frequent diners and 41% of occasional diners use their mobile phone to decide on a fast-food restaurant. You have to assume that’s just as prevalent with restaurants in general. Instagram says that for restaurant goers on mobile, 23% take a photo purely to remember the experience, and 15% share that experience on their social channels. They report that after seeing friends’ photos and videos of fast-food restaurants on Instagram, 66% of frequent diners want to visit.

Interestingly, Instagram users that follow restaurants are 1.4 times more active on Instagram than average, indicating that they use the platform for more than just posting photos. Instagram reports that they like 4.5 times more content, post 3 times more than the average user and comment 7 times more frequently than typical. That’s amazing. One wonders if there is some other common variable other than liking restaurants, but we’ll go with that for now.

Since Instagram was launched food has been a big part of the app, with people posting millions of photos and videos of what they were about to eat. Restaurant have taken note of this posting fetish and thought, what can we do to feed into this without becoming another unwanted ad? That’s where the concept of crave comes in. Restaurants are focusing posts and ads on making people hungry, using Italian music when showing a video of a pizza being made, showing extreme closeups of a Ruby Tuesday hamburger so that people can almost taste it, in the case of Fridays showing a very satisfied person eating their ribs. The point is to focus on the food in order to create the crave.

Instagram says that Ruby Tuesday ran a series of 5 video ads and saw a 22-point lift in ad recall—outperforming similar campaigns by 96%. They say it also drove a 10-point lift in purchase intent among 45-54 year olds—which outperformed nearly 75% of similar campaigns for the same demographic.

“TGI Friday’s developed a two-phased campaign that used video and carousel ads, as well as local awareness ads on Facebook, to promote its ribs and encourage people to enjoy them at a physical location,” noted the Instagram ad team. “The six-week company not only drove a 3-point lift in purchase intent, but more than 50,000 restaurant visits were attributed to the campaign.”

Dairy Queen’s Instagram campaign reach 20 million people, driving an 18 point lift in ad recall among 25-34 year olds. They say it also drove an 8 point lift in awareness of its “Upside Down or Free” promotion and a 3 point lift in purchase intent. Not much in purchase intent but it definitely drove the crave.

“We wanted to build up our presence on Instagram and occupy the currently sparse dessert space,” said Jenell Lammers, Digital Marketing Manager, Dairy Queen (View photo at top). “We’ve done just that with this campaign, which further proved that Instagram is not only great for organic posts but can really drive results.”

According to a post on the Instagram Business blog the number one driver of visits to restaurants is the act of craving. In advertising this simply means making people hungry for what your are selling. Restaurants love Instagram because of its visualness, its frequent use of video in posts and probably most importantly, its primarily consumed on a mobile device.

A 2015 study showed that 53% of frequent diners and 41% of occasional diners use their mobile phone to decide on a fast-food restaurant. You have to assume that’s just as prevalent with restaurants in general. Instagram says that for restaurant goers on mobile, 23% take a photo purely to remember the experience, and 15% share that experience on their social channels. They report that after seeing friends’ photos and videos of fast-food restaurants on Instagram, 66% of frequent diners want to visit.

Interestingly, Instagram users that follow restaurants are 1.4 times more active on Instagram than average, indicating that they use the platform for more than just posting photos. Instagram reports that they like 4.5 times more content, post 3 times more than the average user and comment 7 times more frequently than typical. That’s amazing. One wonders if there is some other common variable other than liking restaurants, but we’ll go with that for now.

Since Instagram was launched food has been a big part of the app, with people posting millions of photos and videos of what they were about to eat. Restaurant have taken note of this posting fetish and thought, what can we do to feed into this without becoming another unwanted ad? That’s where the concept of crave comes in. Restaurants are focusing posts and ads on making people hungry, using Italian music when showing a video of a pizza being made, showing extreme closeups of a Ruby Tuesday hamburger so that people can almost taste it, in the case of Fridays showing a very satisfied person eating their ribs. The point is to focus on the food in order to create the crave.

Instagram says that Ruby Tuesday ran a series of 5 video ads and saw a 22-point lift in ad recall—outperforming similar campaigns by 96%. They say it also drove a 10-point lift in purchase intent among 45-54 year olds—which outperformed nearly 75% of similar campaigns for the same demographic.

“TGI Friday’s developed a two-phased campaign that used video and carousel ads, as well as local awareness ads on Facebook, to promote its ribs and encourage people to enjoy them at a physical location,” noted the Instagram ad team. “The six-week company not only drove a 3-point lift in purchase intent, but more than 50,000 restaurant visits were attributed to the campaign.”

Dairy Queen’s Instagram campaign reach 20 million people, driving an 18 point lift in ad recall among 25-34 year olds. They say it also drove an 8 point lift in awareness of its “Upside Down or Free” promotion and a 3 point lift in purchase intent. Not much in purchase intent but it definitely drove the crave.

“We wanted to build up our presence on Instagram and occupy the currently sparse dessert space,” said Jenell Lammers, Digital Marketing Manager, Dairy Queen (View photo at top). “We’ve done just that with this campaign, which further proved that Instagram is not only great for organic posts but can really drive results.”

[ Download MP3 | Transcript | iTunes | Soundcloud | Raw RSS ] I’d like to introduce you to two sisters who very much embody the emotion their company brand presents – #GetMerry! The Merrymaker sisters – Emma and Carla Papas – are originally from Canberra, but today live on…

Instagram announced today the ability to add stickers to your posts, just like Snapchat. The stickers will be both for the consumer like Snapchat, but more importantly will also be targeted at businesses which are looking for creative ways to promote their products and services.

“Now you have new ways to turn any business moment into something you want to share with your followers,” posted the Instagram blog team. “No matter where your business is or what you’re up to, you can add context to your story with stickers.”

Instagram also announced that on iOS you can now save your entire business story from the past 24 hours to your camera roll as a single video.

How to Use Stickers on Instagram

Simply take a photo and video and then click the new stickers button which is right next to the text and drawing buttons. They say you can “tap the smiley face to find customizable stickers for weather, the current time and even your location.”

Facebook is rolling out a unified inbox for businesses to manages communications across all of their social platforms; Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. This allows businesses to save time by only having to open only one app to send and receive messages.

Now, Facebook says you can reply to Facebook comments, visitor posts, reviews, messages and Instagram comments directly from the updated inbox by tapping on the content you want to answer. Of course, you can still use the apps directly as well.

The unified inbox will roll out to anyone using the business focused Pages Manager mobile app over the next few weeks. Facebook says it will be available for all other devices soon as well. To make it work simply connect your Facebook and Instagram accounts by clicking on the messaging icon at the bottom of your Page while you’re in the Pages Manager App which will then prompt you to login into Instagram.

“The new and improved inbox gives me a quick snapshot of all media channels in an organized and succinct way,” said Nicole Chase, admin of Nicssential Oils. “It cuts down the time I spend on administrative tasks by around 12%, and it allows me to provide more detailed and personalized service.”

Facebook says it will be adding additional features that make sense to make it more useful for business.

Keeping it Personal

In the app you can also click to see a basic profile of anybody you are communicating with including any previous interactions with your company. This lets you keep your messaging more personal and effective.

Instagram says that it now has 500,000 advertisers on its platform. “Today, we’re excited to announce there are more than 500,000 advertisers growing their businesses on Instagram,” they said in their blog announcement. “In just six months, the number of advertisers has more than doubled. And that includes a variety of businesses from around the world. In fact, the top five countries seeing advertiser adoption are the US, Brazil, UK, Australia and Canada. Businesses have been an important part of the Instagram community since the beginning. Here’s why Instagram continues to be an essential place for businesses to grow.”

The Instagram community is more than 500 million strong, so it’s not surprise that consumer targeted marketing is taking off on the platform. What businesses like is their ability to become part of the consumer engagement experience, not just an advertiser butting into the conversation.

Instagram Working for Business?

Instagram noted that 50% of “Instagrammers” follow a business and their surveys indicate that 60% of Instagram users say they learned about a product or service on Instagram. They view their platform as passion marketing which businesses can tap into. They say that 75% of their users take action after being inspired by a post. Actions include clicking to a website, searching, shopping or telling a friend.

There have been 1 billion actions taken on their ads just in the last 12 months since Instagram ads were launched. Internal surveys show that 70% of ad campaigns received “significant lifts” of online conversion or mobile app installs. Since Instagram made change to their link ad format in June, they saw ad performance increase by 45%. Additionally, an Oracle Data Cloud report concluded that Instagram ads drove a median 1.8% lift in in-store sales and a 2.1% lift in household penetration, across 12 US CPG campaigns that were measured for potential sales impact.

Consumer Brands Love Instagram

The handbag brand Dagne Dover, working with its ad agency Mason Interactive, effectively used the Shop Now call to action button in a recent campaign. They targeted students, mothers, professionals and women interested in fashion and travel according to Instagram.

The campaign doubled its traffic and increased its return on ad spend 13X over a two-month period, according to Melissa Mash, CEO at Dagne Dover.

Virtually every major brand is now using Instagram to reach consumers in their niche markets. Brands such as Macy’s, Petsmart, Staples and Fossil are among the half million pushing their products on Instagram.

Instagram Ads Work For Small Business Too

Instagram is one of the few platforms that works just as well for small business advertisers as it does for the big brands. Since it is a Facebook company, it runs on the same ad backend as Facebook, with similar targeting and bidding options.

Whether a business is promoting a sale, marketing an event or seeking Instagram followers, you can advertise for as little as $ 5 a day.

One online writer experimented by promoting an article she wrote for Entrepreneur and was able to obtain 2,000 likes for only 1 cent each! With that ultra low conversion cost it’s worth experimenting.

Video has become a major focal point of social media marketing as the major social networks continue to expand upon their video offerings.

Hootsuite announced new video integrations with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to enable organizations to manage videos from one platform. A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews the integrations will help businesses reduce complexity and increase reach across social channels to improve engagement with customers.

“Hootsuite integrations enable organizations to better manage their videos alongside other social media initiatives,” the spokesperson says. “From the Hootsuite platform, users can approve, schedule, and publish videos across social networks. The video integrations also allow users to monitor comments and collaborate securely as a team to manage multiple accounts so that they can respond faster to customers inquires.”

Users can share videos across multiple social networks, schedule them for the right time, respond to followers by monitoring comments (with the ability to approve, delete, and mark as spam), monitor competitors, industry trends, and other share-worthy videos, share access to YouTube channels across departments/teams, and manage videos from mobile devices.

CEO Ryan Holmes says, “Our new video integrations with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram underscores how crucial video is to organizations as they evolve their digital transformation strategies. These integrations will better support our clients who are investing in video for broad appeal, promotion and education to really engage and grow their audience.”

The company will host a webinar on social video on May 3, when it will discuss why organizations should move to a “video-centric mindset” for their social strategy, effective ways to create and find engaging video, and how brands are already using video successfully.